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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1998 WFP Collective, Inc.
In January, 1969, American earth artist Robert Smithson made a proposal to the British Columbian government. He would purchase Miami Islet, a 50-foot long hunk of barren rock in Georgia Strait, and then cover it with industrial glass (tons of broken beer bottles), leaving the glass to break down against the elements, thus transforming the "ugly pumice island" into a "thing of beauty subtly reflecting the light off the water." The plan was initially approved, but by 1970 the Glass Island project had been shut down. A media assault of politicians, other artists, and environmental activists claimed the trashing of this hunk of rock would cause a loss of precious habitat for seals and cormorants.
This was the first time Smithson had encountered such opposition, and the first time an audience outside the art world cared enough to comment on his work. He later wrote that "the militant groups are using the 'pollution panic' so they can take political power from the industries, and they are using my art as a 'symbol' for their propaganda," and, "The rat of politics always gnaws at the cheese of art."
He gradually gave up his sixties avant-garde aesthetic of culling commercial and industrial elements from life and importing them into art. He became more curious about how art affected "the public domain," and more open to a possibly wider audience and to other patronage besides galleries and museums. He, too, was affected by the need for his work to be seen in order to be validated. Although he moved across the country looking for sites in remote places while attempting to find sponsors in industry and civic circles, he never approached environmental groups for funding. He could not entirely give up his artist-as-martyr stance.
Smithson died a few years after the battle of Glass Island, in a plane crash in Texas as he filmed his Amarillo Ramps project. During his lifetime his niche was unrealized; his ideas were porous and fertile as airborne spores. Glass Island provided a cautionary tale for artists at the time, and 30 years later artists continue to be influenced by his experience, writings, and work.
On With the Show
Vancouver, BC artist/curator Anatole Russell-Ingram invited five artists to join him in commentary on what happened to Smithson in 1970, and the result was the January show Glass Island Revisited at Seattle's SOIL gallery. Russell-Ingram says the artists all come from conceptual or studio-based practices, have lived and worked in this region, and have worked in the public domain, from applying for public art competitions to serving on jury committees. They have all "accepted and rejected, to varying extents, the public art practice."
That stated, Glass Island Revisited offered a playful, crowded, yet compelling sendup of Smithson's anti-idealist ideas about the landscape (natural, industrial, urban) and the public. Each artist took how we interact with where we live one or two steps further. Niki Lederer's sculpture Floating Space, one of the more accessible works in the show, consisted of miniature kayaks made of dental dam rubber stretched over thin wire armatures, and hung from the ceiling in such a way as to suggest the buoyancy of a kayak on the water.
Joshua Lovelace's documentation of his "guerrilla art performance" consisted of photographs, in precise sequence, of the artist hand writing text-with magic marker-from Homer's Odyssey on the dividing line between pedestrians and cyclists on the streets of Montreal. Colin Zaug's Ro-topiary was a bumbershoot-size interactive piece suggesting the rotating scenic backdrops of old movies. The viewer could walk, at an angle, around a rotating landscape (raw green scribbles on a piece of fluted polypropylene) on a ramp made of particle board and plywood.
Daniel Joliffe wanted to "activate" Shift, his electronically based, larger-than-life Microsoft logo and logo study, by having media and corporate representatives attend the show's opening. Russell-Ingram's sumptuous white lacquered pieces led the viewer gently to consider the minimalist grandeur of color field painting, while his photograph of a body of water without context (read: a pond outside an office building, but framed in the show without such references) led us to consider, in wondering about the image, the nature or act of contemplation itself.
The curmudgeon of the show was Yvette Poorter, a prolific artist whose works were all the more powerful for their seeming nonchalance. In Pearl Necklace, the pearls were actually pocket lint, and the potato-shaped mound the necklace encircled was actually an entire ecosystem-complete with earthworms, fruit flies, and Santa Fe dirt, seeded at the gallery for a second stage of growth. Waving was a latticed, quilt-like arrangement of toilet paper strips stitched together across a metal frame, filled at intervals with pockets of plastic fruit, all gently blown by a small electric fan underneath.
Back to the Earth
The SOIL collective, 25 members strong and growing, is the brainchild of Sean Miller and Bethany Taylor, who moved here in 1995 from Colorado and Idaho. SOIL members first made their mark on the local art scene with a group installation at the Speakeasy and they won a juror's award at the Northwest Annual in Bellevue in July, 1996.
Miller says the name soil conjures associations with the myriad particles that compose earth and with the idea of a "non-hierarchical way of working together." They came here expecting to find an art scene on the cutting edge of ideas, but found very few artist-run spaces. In June their lease is up, as Harbor Properties begins reconstruction on their block, and they're currently negotiating for other spaces in Seattle.
The SOIL collective holds bimonthly meetings and asks members to pay dues. Contact Sean or Bethany at 206-623-5950 if you want to join them, propose a show, or offer them a new home.
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